Quote

A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them.

Marshall McLuhan

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Marshall McLuhan
Age: 69 †
Born: 1911
Born: July 21
Died: 1980
Died: December 31
Literary Critic
Philosopher
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
Edmonton
Alberta
Herbert Marshall McLuhan
Marshall MacLuhan
Marshall Mac Luhan
Shapes
Ceases
Leave
Addition
Position
Positions
Media
Medium
Peace
Mediums
Doe
Finds
Never
Cease
Older
Oppress

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All media are extensions of some human faculty- psychic or physical.
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The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.
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Affluence creates poverty.
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The greatest propaganda in the world is our mother tongue, that is what we learn as children, and which we learn unconsciously. That shapes our perceptions for life. That is propaganda at its most extreme form.
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Today we are beginning to notice that the new media are not just mechanical gimmicks for creating worlds of illusion, but new languages with new and unique powers of expression.
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... Their power to see environments as they really are.
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First we build the tools, then they build us.
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Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity.
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Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual.
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Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience co-exist in a state of active interplay.
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The story begins only when the book closes.
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I do not explain, I explore.
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A commercial society whose members are essentially ascetic and indifferent in social ritual has to be provided with blueprints and specifications for evoking the right tone for every occasion.
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If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch.
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The family circle has widened. The worldpool of information fathered by the electric media--movies, Telstar, flight--far surpassesany possible influence mom and dad can now bring to bear. Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world's a sage.
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Attention spans get very weak at the speed of light, and that goes along with a very weak identity.
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